Exploring Skopje

3 October 2024 - Скопје

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As usual I was up before the sun, and when I opened my window for some fresh air I could hear the muslim call to prayer being blasted from a minaret somewhere. Macedonian is a language written in the cyrillic alphabet and apparently a third of the country is muslim. While I've being practicing my cyrillic alphabet, I somehow missed the muslim thing. Of course it makes sense since the country was a part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. So Skopje, or Скопје as they write it here, is more like Sarajevo than Zagreb.

After breakfast this morning I wandered out to find the Swiss embassy where I learned that I need to contact the regional embassy in Pristina to get a return visa. So this trip may include a trip to Kosovo as well, but hopefully they can just register it online. We'll see what they say. It's only about 3 hours away by bus.

My hotel is next to a large park on the river Vardar. Across the river towering over the city is Kale, the Skopje fortress. Supposedly originally built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in was thereafter reused and rebuilt by the Turks. Today it is a ruin, including buildings from the 20th century that are unused and have fallen into disrepair. The views from the walls down to the city and to the mountains are incredible though. It's strange that with so many nice things in this city they haven't bothered with the upkeep of the fortress.

Outside the fortress is a large mosque and then down the hill is the old city bazaar. Tiny streets. Tiny shops. Again very remeniscent of Sarajevo, but much, much bigger. And the bazaar seems to be a living part of the city rather than a tourist attraction. There were shops selling shoes, shops with garden tools, shops with bike supplies, coffee booths with chairs on the streets, shops with jewelery, and shops with woodstoves and wedding dresses. It was only when I got to the edge of the bazaar by the new city that I finally found tourist shops where I could get a souvenir shotglass to add to my collection.

North Macedonia is the name of the country the past few years because Greece childishly blackballed Macedonia from joining NATO and the EU. So Macedonia signed a treaty to change it's name, stop using the 16 pointed star, and a bunch of other stipulations the Greeks felt were cultural appropriations. I still landed yesterday and Alexander the Great airport and passed two huge statues of him on either side of the old stone bridge today. By changing their name and following the other stiplutions of the treaty the country of North Macedonia was able to join NATO in 2020, but before they could start accession talks with the EU Bulgaria stepped in to block them for similarly petty reasons. Bulgaria once ruled the country and considers the Macedonian language to be a dialect of Bulgarian. The current hang-up to moving forward with EU negotiations is the Bulgarian demand that North Macedonia amend its constitution to give the Bulgarian minority special status.

In the afternoon I went to the zoo.